Earlier this year, in the Fuel Adjustment Tariff case, the Lahore High Court (LHC) declared that electricity was part of the fundamental right to life of every person. This declaration imposes a legal obligation upon the State to ensure that this right is not violated. Expecting this from a State and government, that in recent memory has not been up to the task, is a tall order. Nevertheless, the ‘energy crisis’ — as the mismanagement in the sector has come to be known — was an election issue and is now one of the main policy areas the newly-elected governments are expected to lock horns on.

The electricity sector is unique in many ways. It is one of the most capital intensive sectors to develop and its product, electricity, must be produced and consumed in sync.

After reforms that began in the 1990s, the electricity sector in Pakistan was ‘unbundled’ — that is, the individual energy and electricity components of the vertically integrated Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) were separated, their assets transferred to companies established under the Companies Ordinance 1984, to be operated and run independently by the boards of directors. Thus the Wapda thermal electricity generation units became the Generation Companies, the high-voltage transmission grid became the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) and the Area Electricity Boards became Distribution Companies such as Lesco, Iesco, Hesco and so on. These ‘unbundled’ units — their governance theoretically separated from the control of WAPDA and the Ministry of Water and Power, are regulated by a Nepra, which grants generation, transmission and distribution licences, sets electricity tariffs and generally regulates the industry. Theoretically.

Several decades and a Pepco later, the energy sector in Pakistan has become a money-sucking black hole. No matter how much cash is shovelled into the circular-debt, because the sector is run so poorly, its appetite is never sated. Now, there are many ways to address the energy crisis in Pakistan. This is because of the very many organisations that operate within it. My experience has been in the distribution side — where distribution companies buy electricity from the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC), sell it to the consumers, collect payments from consumers and repay NTDC — and it is well known that several short-and medium-term efforts can begin to stem the circular debt’s appetite and put the sector on the path of reform.

First, distribution companies need to know just how much electricity they receive from the NTDC. Unless they know how much electricity passes through their system, it’s impossible to correctly asses if any is being stolen or unpaid for. At the moment, Lesco, the country’s largest distribution utility, does not have meters at the common delivery points from where it receives its supply from NTDC.

Second, distribution companies need to know where the electricity in their system is being consumed and by whom. This requires a grid metering system of the type successfully installed and operated by the KESC in Karachi. It requires feeder coding that properly shows where electricity from a grid station is going and to which transformers. The KESC system has helped that company identify areas where electricity theft is high or bill payments low so that areas where theft is low and bill payments high do not suffer the same loadshedding as their energy pilfering neighbours.

Smart meters that transmit consumer usage information directly to the distribution company by way of SMS or radio-frequency transmission, without the interference of a linesman, can dramatically reduce incidents of electricity theft as well as the utility payroll costs (ultimately reducing tariffs).

While these three examples sound simple enough — and they are! —distribution companies across the board have recommended similar measures. The real question is why nothing has been done about them. In my opinion, this is the question upon which all power sector reform turns: the ability of the distribution companies to enforce their own decisions. Put another way: the ability of Pepco and the Ministry of Water and Power to give up the control of the status quo they have so poorly exercised for so long.

To date, the unbundling of Wapda has not come hand-in-hand with a transfer of power to the unbundled entities. To date, the ministry continues to order even the transfer and postings of company employees. These employees do not look to the boards of their companies for orders. They naturally look to the entity that controls their salaries, their promotions and their career prospects. It’s an open secret that the previous secretary conducted two Skype meetings a day with the CEOs of the distribution companies each day. The Secretary acts for the shareholder of the distribution companies, and any decent manager will tell you it’s when the seith starts interfering directly in operations that you know things are heading downhill. During my term at Lesco, the company was served by four CEOs. None were selected or appointed by the board of directors. In fact, the notifications appointing them were not even copied to the board! It’s no surprise that despite regular complaints to the shareholder, over 50 Lesco board resolutions remained unaddressed.

Take also the attempt by the outgoing prime minister, just days before the caretaker set-up was announced, to reverse the 20-year unbundling policy and have the CEOs of distribution companies report directly to the Chairman Wapda. How, how, how can the CEO of a company, established under the Companies Ordinance, be directed to report somewhere other than the board of directors — and that too by notification? Thankfully, good sense prevailed and the notification was withdrawn days later. But this is just an example of the lengths to which vested interests in the power sector will go to protect themselves.

A mandate of a new government, political commitment to address entrenched mismanagement, the opportunities of the Eighteenth Amendment all present a narrow window of opportunity to begin working on energy sector reform. It’s anyone’s guess how things will fare. In the past, the energy sector has been to our government what Afghanistan has been to imperial design: a graveyard of empires.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2013.

The deputy chairman of the Planning Commission has been in the news recently, arguing about reform, arguing that the Planning Commission should be abolished and generally speaking in the frank tongue of a technocrat in the last days of his tenure, which he is. More recently, the deputy chairman was reported to have told a visiting World Bank delegation just how misplaced some of their priorities were.

The Bank had invited stakeholders to an Islamabad hotel for a launch workshop on its Pakistan Water Supply and Sanitation Sector Study, which, it informed, was a review of  “current institutions, governance, incentives and financing capacity needs and draws on examples of national and international practices to propose options for strengthening sector performance and sustainability.” Or, in Twitterese, #WorldBankSpeak.

On a separate occasion, I have heard the deputy chairman put forward a confounding proposal on water and sanitation: there are over 100 million mobile phones in Pakistan, and far fewer bathrooms (according to the Bank, 30 per cent of the rural population and 72 per cent of the urban population have access to “improved sanitation facilities” — whatever that means). Does this not suggest that there is simply a greater demand for mobile phones than there is for clean toilets?

Anyone who’s seen Swedish public health expert Hans Rosling’s TED Talk on “New Insights in Poverty” will be able to find a way out of this proposition. Rosling speaks of the means and goals of development. Of how, over all things, economic development is a means of development. Also important means of development include governance and education and, in decreasing importance, health, environment, human rights and culture. Of course, as a goal of development, economic growth is nothing. Nor are good governance and education, per se, the aims of development. A long and healthy life spent in a clean environment is one of the goals of development, but not as important as being able to enjoy and practice one’s culture and enjoying robust human rights. The prioritisation and sequencing of development depend on whether one is chasing a means or goal. What the deputy chairman suggests is that water and sanitation, though crucially important, should not be the sole focus of development.

Ancient Rome was the first city in civilisation to support a population of over one million. The next city to do so was London in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Has anyone — the Bank, the Planning Commission — ever wondered why cities didn’t grow larger for so long? The answer is found in one of the lesser known, but most important of revolutions: the “Sanitary Revolution”.

One of Rome’s greatest achievements was the aqueduct, which could pipe clean water hundreds of miles to the homes and baths of the city. Other cities tried, but failed, to do the same. Lack of clean water, lack of sanitation and the diseases they spread were the norm in cities all the way up to Industrial-Revolution Europe.

It wasn’t until London ordered itself a sewage system and other Western cities followed suit, advances in medicine taught people that disease spread through impure water, and Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization that the “Sanitary Revolution” was complete. Improved sanitation allowed cities to grow. Indeed, it spawned the Urban Revolution. In 1800, 2.5 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. In 2006, over 50 per cent of the world’s population was recorded to be living in cities.

There are fewer bathrooms in Pakistan because, through accident of history, the transactional costs of setting one up are infinitely higher than getting a mobile phone (a few hundred rupees, an ID card and Hafeez Centre will take no more than 15 minutes). Also, the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese and then European monks brewed their own beer because it was a safe alternative to drinking the available, impure water. The same is true for wine, coffee and tea. Until the “Sanitary Revolution”, a clean glass of water was an impossibility. And so was development.

Pakistan faces a water quality crisis. All the cities in Pakistan report impure drinking water supplies. The Indus is polluted by the untreated discharge of industrial and municipal waste. Water-borne disease is rampant. Half the patients in hospitals today are there because of water-related ailments. Hundreds of thousands die premature deaths. And poor sanitation costs the Pakistani exchequer the equivalent of 3.94 per cent of its GDP. Anyone who knows the role a “Sanitary Revolution” can play, can easily see that sophistry and hotel workshops are not the weapons needed to fight this war.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2013.

It’s tempting to explain our most complicated of worlds in the most simple of terms. This is not to say the most complicated of phenomenon cannot be reduced to a most elegantly simple explanation. But those who are vested with such gifts are lucky. Mostly, sophistication begets sophistication.

Take the Metro Bus, a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system recently inaugurated in Lahore. Public transport is about cities, about mobility, about infrastructure, about local politics, about so many things. How can one begin to reply to a question asking whether one is for or against the Metro Bus? The sophistication of what the BRT represents cannot be explained away through such a binary divide, though the exercise does give one an insight into the sociopolitical motivations of the person answering.

“The BRT was too expensive,” some will argue. One can try to compare the cost of similar projects elsewhere but will probably come to conclude that (1) the characteristics of the BRT system set up elsewhere were unique to its circumstances (no two cities are alike); (2) it was expensive elsewhere, too; and (3) that the Metro Bus BRT is substantially cheaper than the other transport option the Government of Punjab had: a multibillion-dollar underground/overground mass transit system.

“The BRT has hurt the built environment of the city”, others will argue, and will explain how the metal grill that protects the BRT corridor as it snakes through the city is an act of ‘severance’ — neighbourhoods, mohallas and the social infrastructure they support are now strewn apart by the BRT. When Robert Moses built Manhattan’s West Side Highway, he destroyed the dockyards that had, for centuries, been one of the great sources of income for New York City. Through these and other acts of highway “severance”, many have argued that the Moses-style development eventually led the city to bankruptcy in 1975. Could the BRT, critics will suggest, mean such a future for beautiful, historical Lahore?

“How could the Government of Punjab afford such an expensive project on one road in one city of the province”, you will be told, “when people perish every year simply because the city doesn’t have a single waste treatment plant and allows all of its industrial municipal waste to be dumped into the Ravi to pollute the surface water downstream?” The enormous chunk of the provincial annual development budget the Metro Bus consumed is subject to final determination, but all agree it was a massive chunk.

I’m a past master at criticism but am beginning to understand that in our complicated and sophisticated world — while we are all free to try and explain it in the simplest of terms — mistakes can happen. One can spend a lifetime debating the points above and a mountain more but the fact is that Lahore now has a multibillion-rupee, 28-kilometre cement, steel and Metro Bus BRT system. (One should also note the city also has a multibillion-rupee nearly-completed Ring Road as well, as this argument applies to it, too). What needs to be done looking ahead is to assess the situation and see how we can plan to try to ensure that the Metro Bus works properly and that the city benefits from it. Here, I will offer two thoughts to critics and armchair activists seeking a quick and easy explanation.

First off, we must eschew quick planning. The remarkably quick construction of the BRT can be compared with how quickly similar projects are carried out elsewhere. But you’ll be missing the point if you don’t recognise the big difference between the two: elsewhere, projects are quick in the construction because they were years in the preparation. Ours was quick in construction because it was missing some preparation.

Secondly, the demerits of poor planning should not mean we desist from planning and development altogether. The BRT is an ambitious project but its success or failure doesn’t take from the fact that transportation and mobility are two commodities in great demand everywhere in the country. We need more transport projects, but the next ones need to be better planned and better executed. (One notable exception: the team that put together the software for operating the Metro Bus needs to be commended; their effort was entirely homegrown, in record time and remarkable cost-effective). We now know what our mistakes are. Second attempts should ensure they are not repeated.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 21^st, 2013. 

When we think of transport, we are often distracted by large infrastructure projects. The odd link-road here, motorway there and overpass beyond, so to speak. Quite often, transport gets tied to infrastructure, which it is. But that’s not the only thing transport is about. There is one issue, at least, that scarcely gets noticed: safety; about what happens once that transport infrastructure is in place. Safe Communities Pakistan, an NGO working to improve traffic safety in Punjab, compiles a Road Traffic Accident (RTA) diary based on accidents responded to by the Rescue 1122 Emergency Services in the province every day.

On April 5, for instance, the RTA diary recorded 541 traffic accidents in Punjab. These were spread over every one of the 36 Districts of the Province. Three lives were lost, 456 victims were seriously injured and 238 received minor injuries. Ninety-eight of the 541 accidents affected pedestrians, 377 affected passengers and 222 affected drivers. A total of 80 accidents took place in Lahore, involving 108 people, placing the provincial capital at the top of the list, followed by 60 accidents with 69 victims in Faisalabad. In total, 452 motorbikes, 46 autorickshaws, 54 motor cars, 23 vans, five passenger buses, 13 trucks and 84 other types of vehicles were involved.

On April 4, the RTA diary recorded that 497 traffic accidents took place with incidents reported in every one of the 36 districts. Seven people lost their lives, 373 victims were seriously injured and 209 received minor injuries. Eighty of the 497 accidents affected pedestrians, 313 affected passengers and 196 affected drivers. A total of 119 accidents took place in Lahore, involving 142 victims, placing the provincial capital at the top of the list followed by 58 accidents, involving 66 victims in Faisalabad. In total, 403 motorbikes, 41 autorickshaws, 50 motor cars, 18 vans, 12 passenger busses, 13 trucks and 55 other types of vehicles were in involved.

I’ve been receiving the Safe Communities RTA diary every day since March 22. The steady stream of bad news about accidents and casualties never ebbs. Every evening, when I get the diary via email, I can’t help but think of the countless tragedies that unfolded that day, which could have been prevented by the application of one word: safety.

The Urban Resource Centre in Karachi also compiles regular Road Accident Reports. This and the RTA diary read exactly the same: a steady, unsympathetic counting of hundreds of accidents and the loss of a handful of lives every day.

The recent brutal sexual assault of a female commuter on a bus in New Delhi sparked outrage and concern worldwide. It brought into light the lack of security faced by women who employ public transport. This is not a South Asian phenomenon. Women in more ‘developed’ nations are not immune from violence on public transport either. Women make up more than half the public transport users on a global level; their safety should be a of paramount global concern. But have you ever heard someone talk seriously about this subject?

EMBARQ, a transport blog, has prepared a list of demands as part of their Safe Transport for Women Initiative. These include that transport authorities recognise the gender differences and needs of their ridership; that safe public transportation be provided to women of all socio-economic classes; that the government be held accountable for providing safe transport to women; that transport providers be held accountable for acts of violence against women who use public transport.; that public transport providers include women in their transportation planning process in order to address and meet their needs.

Public transport for women in Pakistan is more or less non-existent. The Urban Resource Centre in Karachi also has surveys and interviews of female commuters. Reading them, one feels that these women should be given medals of bravery just for the act of getting to work or school in the morning. It shouldn’t be this way.

Without safe and reliable public transport, nearly half of our population — women, children, senior citizens and the handicapped — are effectively rendered immobile and unable to participate in social or economic activity. In Lahore, the Lahore Project estimates that female unemployment is greater than 90 per cent. Imagine what would happen to the economy, to the vibrancy of our cities, if women and children, for example, were safe in the knowledge that their movement through the city would be safe and respected?

Transportation and transportation issues are about far more than infrastructure. They touch upon one of our more valuable and less recognised fundamental rights: the right to movement and mobility. Development schemes that fail to take into account how they restrict mobility and imperil safety need to be reassessed.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2013. 

In 2010, the Planning Commission (PC) of Pakistan announced its Framework for Economic Growth (FEG). The FEG aimed to replace the PC’s previous 10-year development plans with a new paradigm for economic growth. It remains to be seen whether the FEG will outlast the previous government and entrench itself in the planning process or whether it will be replaced by the old or even a new approach.

Central to the FEG is the idea of creative cities. It is argued that the Pakistani people and economy are fast becoming urban phenomena and that for the Pakistani economy to continue to grow and provide for the needs and demands of its rapidly growing population, for it to prosper in an increasingly complex and specialised urbanised global economy, the economic efficiency of our cities — measured in terms of how  ‘creative’ they allow one to be — should be a priority.

There are other themes in the FEG, like the need for quality governance, vibrant markets and an energetic youth and community. As a layman lawyer, I can find no objection to the approach of the FEG, but find that its reference to creative cities has drawn it the most criticism.

IA Rehman once described the typical argument in Pakistan as one party making wild assumptions about the other’s argument, sweeping in with rhetorical flourish and then claiming victory. But there is more to the back-and-forth on the FEG.

Critics of the FEG will point out that even though Pakistan’s population is rapidly urbanising and may reach 60 per cent urbanisation in the coming decades, more than half of the labour force remains involved in agriculture. They will point out that even though services, industry and manufacturing — all essentially urban activities — contribute to nearly two thirds of GDP, Pakistan’s economic development has always been linked to its agricultural productivity. They will tell you that the FEG, by ignoring Pakistan’s rural and agricultural character, is a flawed document that needs revisiting.

I am no expert in economic planning, but I write this column in light of World Water Day, which happened on March 22, and can’t help but notice how the back-and-forth on the FEG also involves water and how water is central to whatever course better minds have in plan for Pakistan’s economy.

Throughout history, large basin civilisations like those along the Nile, Indus, Euphrates and Yellow rivers have evolved hydrological societies characterised by labour-intensive water management, rigid and stratified bureaucracies and authoritarian government command. These characteristics were necessary in order to produce a surplus that could sustain a large population and ensure security. In contrast, the narrow valleys of the northern Mediterranean were not able to produce the surplus necessary to sustain large populations and so, the people of those areas took to navigating the relatively stable waters of the lake-like Mediterranean and looked to trade to generate their surplus. These practices, in turn, evolved the society into one premised on market democracy and private property.

The use of the waterwheel and better drainage practices in Europe, from the Middle Ages, coupled with the inability of any ruler to hinder water supplies (on the Nile, all it took was an order from the Pharaoh to close a canal), spurred the growth of multiple, autonomous, decentralised regions and market-centric towns that, in turn, shaped the political and economic norms of that society.

A reference to water in the debate on the FEG brings out some of the changing contours of Pakistan’s own society. It is without doubt that we are an Empire of the Indus and all “Children of the Monsoon” (a phrase I first heard used by the learned Ayub Qutb). But how far can we stretch the surplus of the Indus Basin, our nourisher, our giver, our home? How much more can we mine it for our own uses without considering, for a moment, how we have destroyed its ecology and are on the brink of rendering it unproductive? The world is changing and so are we. Perhaps, there is room to consider the lessons water teaches us through history.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2013.

Someone remarked day before yesterday that “in the good old days, today would have been Basant. How far and quickly have we fallen.”

I thought it would be amusing to point out that, since then, the city of Lahore has been gifted three more golf courses, but the thought seemed on a tangent of its own. What is truly surreal is how we live in a part of the world where telling someone to “Go fly a kite” may result in a criminal offence.

In the late 12^th and early 13^th century, it is said that Amir Khusro, the spiritual disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi, sought to relieve his mentor’s grief over the death of a near relative. Khusro is said to have come across villagers dressed in bright yellow — the colour of the mustard in full bloom — and was told they were celebrating the coming of the spring by dressing colourfully and wearing yellow. Khusro decided to do the same to cheer up his ustaad. And to this date, the festival of Basant — celebrated vociferously at the shrine of Nizaumuddin Auliya every year — is a celebration of spring and happiness. Flying kites to ring in the new season is not limited to Delhi: Ali Hajvery — Data Ganj Baksh — the patron saint of Lahore, brought the festival to Lahore after observing it in Delhi.

Decades ago, when Lahore was still a sleepy little city, Basant was a private affair, celebrated with great passion by the residents of the Walled City. With the support of a handful of high profile residents of the Walled City, Basant’s profile gradually grew until, in the mid-1990s, it was a city-wide party heralding the coming of spring.

It was about this time, and a little bit earlier, that Basant was questioned by some as being anti-religion. All sorts of religious and historical arguments were brought to bear. It was also argued that kite wires tangled in high-tension electricity wires caused power outages.  These arguments were dismissed by the Lahore High Court, which said that Basant “is cultural in nature and wedded to the soil” of Lahore (Ramzan Welfare Trust vs. WAPDA PLD 1997 Lahore 235, per Aqil Mirza, J).

Next came the metalled kite string, the senseless and easily preventable loss of life, TV journalism and a proactive Supreme Court and, within the first decade of this new millennium, Basant was suo-motu’d, legislated, banned and binned. A cultural festival of hundreds of years was snuffed.

It’s the beginning of spring and it’s raining while I write this. Might as well.

Yesterday, my wife tweeted: “My seven-year-old daughter, born and brought up in Lahore, asks “What is Basant? #thehearsobs”.  I have, below, reproduced only a few of the dozens of responses.

“aweeee, that’s sad”; “That’s really a shame”; “kindly tell her it was the festival of colours and light until it became a day of [sic] Aerial Firing, Throat Slitting and pain”; “Pakistan has killed the one goo[d] festival they used to enjoy. Both government and criminal mafia are responsible”; “oh so sweet of her, inshallah will bring back basant one day”; “tell her: this is something — infuses new life — that people all over world celebrate…but we can’t’; “Tell her, baita it’s a waste of time and money, time & lives. Leisure time or enjoyment should be only such where we don’t risk [sic] other’s lives”; “Wish long life n health 4 yr daughter. Wid ban on this killer festival many others daughters/sons hv been saved fm cut throat”; “I miss celebrating basant, grew up with yellow preparation, basant night harmless parties #yellow #basant”; “tell her [sic] its killer game”; “Tell Her, Its something tht takes life of innocent ppl, because of some idiots”; “My Lahori husband has no many great stories to share about Basant. Indigenous cultures are under attack everywhere”; “tell her, its just a color that nobody likes to wear anymore”; “You should bring her to Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi, where everything is yellow since yesterday.  Qawwalis and Flowers rule”; “I spent the most awesome Basant night in Lahore several yrs ago watching thousands of kits pierce the black sky”; and “Do convey love to her from her Indian brothers and sisters, we’ll celebrate Basant together sometime in the future.”

To those self-styled defenders of our faith and traditions; to the zealous guardians of children lost only to kite-string: what of your cornflakes, toast and tea for breakfast — there’s no religion or local culture in that; what of the others? By defenestrating Basant from Lahore, you have only taken the colour from your own life.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th, 2013.

Sir Ganaga Ram’s samadhi, like other buildings built at the time and before, sits facing the River Ravi in an area that has now come to be known as Karim Park in Lahore. When the samadhi was built, the river provided one of the ways of approaching the city. Newer structures have been built facing the roads that lead to the newly developed and densely populated Karim Park and now stand with their backs to the river.

With rapid urban development, the speed and manner in which Lahore has sprawled has also changed the way we perceive and treat the River Ravi. We have literally turned our backs to it!

This metaphor serves well to raise the fundamental question: what is our hydro-social contract; our relationship, as a society, to our water resources?

In “Transitioning to Water Sensitive Cities: Historical, Current and Future Transition States”, a paper delivered at the 11^th International Conference on Urban Drainage, a team of Australian academics surveyed their water practices from the early 1800s onwards to identify a typology of six different type of city states and their relationship to water.

The Water Supply City is said to represent the first modern urban water state. Here, the hydro-social compact was relatively straightforward: the effective provision of safe and secure water supplies. Local governments played their part by attempting to ensure “limitless fresh water” as a public right at low cost.

With the discovery — sometime in the mid to late 1800s — that people were getting ill due to pathogen infection of water supplies, London and other cities around the world led the transition to The Sewered City, which involved the design and construction of a sewage system that could dispose of effluent outside cities and usually into receiving waterways that were perceived as environmentally benign. The existing hydro-social contract was expanded so that local water boards assumed responsibility of public health protection to rapidly growing urban populations.

The Drained City emerged after the Second World War with cities rapidly sprawling and suburbanising due to the automobile and low cost of fossil fuels. Large urban footprints upset delicate ecological balances, leading to flooding and property damage, and so, engineers began to develop new cognitive tools (rainfall records and drainage design standards, for example) to meet the challenges they faced. With the large amount of waste they carried, waterways began to be viewed as a nuisance and we begin to see houses built facing away from them for just this purpose. The hydro-social contract remains essentially the same with the centralised service delivery functions of local governments. However, we see more complexity due to the addition of multiple urban water service providers that arose as a consequence of suburban sprawl.

The next three city-state types are not found in history but are located in theory and academic rhetoric. These are the Waterways City, the Water Cycle City and the Water Sensitive City. These differ from existing practices and the existing hydro-social contract in two fundamental ways: firstly, due to rise of internationally recognised principles of environmental law and sustainability, the environment is no longer perceived as benign; and secondly, they recognise the limitations of centralised planning in the sustainable management of water resources and drainage. These models would radically alter the hydro-social contract as they introduce new stakeholders and this, in turn, brings tension between those who still carry the traditional values around water supply and those who seek to adopt new practices. The hydro-social contract of such city states would be adaptive and continually evolving, underpinned by a flexible, decentralised and multiple institutional regime.

The study of water states emanates from the study of sustainable urban water management (SUWM). In Pakistan, where we are told that we are fast becoming a water-scarce country, where we are told that climate change, environmental degradation and poor water management are resulting in the serious misuse of one of our most precious natural resource; where even the fundamental right to access to clean drinking water is being violated, it is time to sink or do SUWM.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2013.

The rights to access to clean drinking water and to a clean and healthy environment are fundamental rights vested in every Pakistani. They are rights that can be enforced against the state institution established to protect them.

Today, Pakistanis are facing a water quality crisis. The Pakistan Council on Research in Water Resources, in a 2007 report, found that every major city in Pakistan was providing unsafe drinking water to people. According to UNICEF, 20 to 40 per cent of Pakistani hospitals are occupied by patients suffering from water-related disease.

The consequence of this crisis will be difficult to bear. Over and above the thousands of lives lost just because of impure water, there is an immense burden on the state, which has to construct hospitals, educate doctors and subsidise medicine.

Yet, there is little knowledge or awareness of how water affects our everyday life. Every year, I ask my students whether they are familiar with the reaches of property law — mortgages, leases and the like — and find they are universally well-conversant with principles they have never had the chance to actually apply in their lives. When I ask them to describe the right they have to water — something none can live without — I face stony silence. At some time and at some place, we seem to have become disconnected to the natural environment in which we live and without which we cannot survive.

Last year, environment law students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences researched and prepared a writ petition regarding the pollution in the River Ravi. The Ravi is the most polluted river in Pakistan, responsible for nearly half the pollution load in the River Indus and its tributaries. And Lahore, which does not have a single waste treatment plant, is the River Ravi’s greatest polluter: the city and its nearly 10 million residents discharge all of their municipal and industrial effluent into the River Ravi — untreated!

Two civil society organisations, the Public Interest Litigation Association of Pakistan and the Lahore Conservation Society, took the case prepared by the LUMS students and filed a petition before the newly constituted Green Bench of the Lahore High Court. The petition was the first case filed before the Green Bench and the Court immediately took notice of the issue and ordered the constitution of a River Ravi Commission for the purposes of finding a sustainable roadmap to restore the natural ecology of the River Ravi.

The Commission comprises important stakeholders in the waste-treatment of the city: the secretary, the Environment Protection Department, the Advocate General, Punjab, the commissioner, Lahore, the MD, WASA, the MD, NESPAK, the president of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as well as experts from the private sector such as DG, WWF-Pakistan, Mr Vaqar Zakriya and Mr Kamil Khan Mumtaz. The commission is chaired by Dr Kausar Abdullah Malik, formerly of the Planning Commission and has increased its strength to 12 by inducting the secretary, irrigation department as a member.

After several meetings spanning four months, the commission recommended, as a first phase, the treatment of 10 cusecs of wastewater using bioremediation and constructed wetlands (rather than the consultant recommended waste stabilisation ponds) at a location near the River Ravi at Babu Sabu. The wetlands would be a first for Pakistan and an opportunity to show Lahoris that home-grown sustainable solutions to their most pressing of problems — waste treatment and access to clean water — are at their doorstep.

The Lahore High Court, in an order that has set a new precedent in public interest environment litigation, ordered the commission to publicise its recommendation and hold a public hearing in the interests of “participatory justice”. Some 40 people attended the public hearing — nowhere near enough for an issue as important as this — but gave constructive input and advice on how the recommendations could be improved. The commission has now been ordered by the court to meet with the chairman of the Planning and Development Department of the government of Punjab in order to coordinate its efforts with the larger efforts of the government to set up waste-treatment facilities in Lahore.

The Ravi case and Ravi Commission are examples of how civil society, cognisant and jealously protective of its rights, can move the state and government to hear its concerns. It is measure of the success of the Ravi case and an example of the eagerness of the government to tend to its responsibilities that the highest levels of government are now strained to think about the pollution in the Ravi. But the success of such initiatives, in the end, depends on society itself. Without public ownership of civil society initiatives, like an untended garden, they are destined to wilt.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 3^rd, 2013.

Two events will have an effect on Lahore and Lahoris. The first is the proposal to rename a roundabout in Shadman after the anti-imperialist freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. The other proposal is the tabling by the Punjab government of the Lahore Canal Heritage Park Bill, 2012 before this session of the Punjab Assembly. Both events are examples of hard work by Lahore’s vibrant civil society in ensuring its voice is heard in the planning and management of its city.

However, the outcomes of both events are uncertain. The Dilkash Lahore Committee — established by the City District Government Lahore (CDGL) to recommend listing heritage sites and renaming the city’s roads, intersections, etc — has recommended changing the name of Fawwara Chowk in Shadman to Bhagat Singh Chowk. However, there are rumours that some people oppose the decision to rename a Pakistani road after a non-Muslim.

Some years ago, civil society from leftist organisations reclaimed Shadman’s Fawwara Chowk in the name of Bhagat Singh to honour him for his sacrifices in pre-Partition India’s struggle against imperialism and colonialism. Civil society has since celebrated his death anniversary and enriched the city’s urban experience by introducing into it a discourse that recognises a Lahori character broader, deeper and older than its existence under this Islamic Republic. One hopes the CDGL will be able to resist any opposition to recognising an anti-imperialist freedom fighter.

The tabling of the Lahore Canal Heritage Park Bill, 2012 is in pursuance of last year’s Supreme Court decision in the Lahore Canal Widening Case. The Court resolved a five-year stand-off between the Government of Punjab, which wanted to widen Lahore Canal Road ostensibly to improve congestion and the Lahore Bachao Tehreek, another civil society organisation that argued that such widening would be harmful to the city’s beauty and natural environment, worsen traffic and be a massive misallocation of resources. The Court had set precedent by constituting a mediation committee that, after public consultation, made 18 recommendations that were adopted by the Court. While conceding the need to widen seven of the proposed 14 kilometres of road, the Mediation Committee stipulated certain measures the Punjab government had to take to ensure proper and sustainable urban planning in the city. One of these steps was to protect the Court’s declaration that the green belt along the Lahore Canal was a “public trust” by enacting appropriate legislation. The Bill, if passed, is that legislation and will certainly be Pakistan’s first law declaring an urban park. Nevertheless, the Bill leaves much to be desired as it still allows the Punjab government the power to determine what parts of the green belt are protected as a park. Some fear that a few years from now, the government could undo the entire purpose and function of the Lahore Bachao Tehreek and Court judgment by simply de-notifying the urban park and widening Canal Road.

These fears appear confirmed by the fact that in September, the Punjab government filed an application before the Supreme Court seeking permission to go ahead with the widening of the entire stretch of the Lahore Canal road from the BRB Canal to Thokar Niaz Beg. The Lahore Bachao Tehreek, now represented by Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, has taken a strong stand against this application, as has Dr Parvez Hassan, the mediator appointed by the Supreme Court. They argue that the Supreme Court’s decision last year was in the nature of a compromise with both the Government of Punjab and the Lahore Bachao Tehreek conceding some ground in return for commitments to improve the urban planning of the city. They argue that the government’s recent application is an attempt to go behind this solemn pact and that even if the government had complied with all 18 of the Mediation Committee’s recommendations, it would still not be permitted to alter the nature of the urban park.

Both these events demonstrate the immense power of civil society in Lahore’s urban planning and its potential in other cities. The efforts of the people, who have sought to participate in the decision-making of this city, is laudable (the Supreme Court has been especially generous in its praise of Lahore’s civil society). But these organisations also know that the gods are fickle and that they must remain constantly engaged in the city’s life. They need support and appreciation. It adds fuel to their fire.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2012.

One of the more recent initiatives of the Government of Punjab, which has — in the absence of a local government — assumed responsibility over urban planning in city districts, is the formation of the Lahore Parking Company as an autonomous wing of the City District Government of Lahore (CDGL).

Car parking may appear to be of trivial significance, paling in importance to things such as sewage treatment and infrastructure development, but a scratch beneath the surface reveals an interaction with urban planning and development that is too important to ignore.

Hitherto, the practice of parking regulation is carried out by auctioning various recognised parking areas throughout the city. In this manner, the city district government earns revenue and control over parking — which is no more than having a tag stuffed under your windscreen wiper and paying Rs10 if you are lucky enough to find a vacant spot.

The CDGL says that there are 367 parking lots in the city and that about 160 of those “are no longer operational” — which means that the CDGL isn’t earning rent from them. Of course, there are plenty more parking lots in the city where “unapproved parking stands” operate. The CDGL claims that there are over one billion rupees to be earned annually through auctioning parking lots and that it is currently earning only a fraction of this potential.

The strategy of the Lahore Parking Company appears to be to take control of the management and rent collecting from all parking lots in the city. It also plans to construct new parking plazas and automate parking by introducing ‘modern technology’. It is receiving Rs200 million from the Government of Punjab as seed money to begin its task. Parking policy in Lahore isn’t about parking. It’s about rent-seeking, with the CDGL as the rent-seeker. It isn’t about improving congestion in the city or improving urban transport facilities. For that, this issue has to be looked at from a completely different angle.

New thinking on parking would begin by identifying the various stakeholders: citizens, who require parking close to their homes or work; businesses that prefer parking close to their doorstep to facilitate customers and employees; developers requiring parking that keeps their projects profitable; and cities, which should require well-managed parking for its citizens while providing for development, congestion management, quality of life and air quality.

These competing interests are all affected by the high costs of parking. In New Delhi, for example, it is estimated that cars take up about 10 per cent of the available land in the city. With low parking fees, it is easy to spot the massive subsidy being provided to the elite that has access to automobiles. A bottle of mineral water is Rs15 but you can park your car in the city all-day for just Rs10. Elsewhere, keeping in mind construction costs, providing parking plazas means incurring heavy expenditures. In Lahore, the Liberty Parking plaza costs upwards of Rs2.5 million per car and this does not include the value of the land the plaza was built on.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani automobile elite seem to think that free and abundant parking is, somehow, a birthright. It is this realm that parking policy must address: where parking is considered a ‘need’ that ought to be catered to rather than a service the city provides at a cost. I need my cup of coffee every morning but don’t think it’s right to argue that the CDGL provide it to me, freely and abundantly, every morning.

Automobile congestion is choking access through the city, which in turn affects the ability of the city to be the dynamic entity that it should be. The chief means of reducing the number of automobiles in a city is public transport; the other is congestion charging. New parking policies must be integrated into the public transport policies of the city. It remains to be seen whether the Lahore Parking Company takes the initiative and begins planning for the chief minister’s beleaguered Bus Rapid Transit project or whether this newcomer on Lahore’s urban planning scene follows the path of so many other good intentions.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2012.